Google & The Trust Project: Help Identify Trustworthy News

In an effort to help with weed out fake news stories and make sure their news results, and core search results, are correct - they announced they are working with the Trust Project to help publishers use "eight trust indicators that newsrooms can add to their content."

The eight indicators include:

Best Practices: Who funds the news outlet and their mission, plus an outlet’s commitments to ethics, diverse voices, accuracy, making corrections, and other standards.

Author Expertise: Details about the journalist, including their expertise and other stories they have worked on.

This will supposedly work with schema and markup, but it is not clear how small or any publisher not part of the initial test bed of 10 or so publishers will work with this. I suspect over time, Google will communicate with publishers how to markup their content to hit all eight points above. Although, I still don't know how this will solve the bigger issue exactly.

Google explained:

News publishers embed markup from schema.org into the HTML code of their articles and on their website. When tech platforms like Google crawl the content, we can easily parse out the information (such as Best Practices, Author Info, Citations & References, Type of Work). This works like the ClaimReview schema tag we use for fact-checking articles. Once we’ve done that, we can analyze the information and present it directly to the user in our various products.

Our next step is to figure out how to display these trust indicators next to articles that may appear on Google News, Google Search, and other Google products where news can be found. Some possible treatments could include using the “Type of Work” indicator to improve the accuracy of article labels in Google News, and indicators such as “Best Practices” and “Author Info” in our Knowledge Panels.

So at first, Google will just add more rich snippet like content to the search results to show searchers more about the publication, the article, the journalist, etc.